Soil and wood, paint and stucco: different media occupied my time. And yet my hands hungered for the written word.
Slippery, time delayed a sentence, tabled a thought that would otherwise be grown into a tome.
Birds nested, plants grew, wilted, and sprouted again—all while I conjured life from a sandy tomb. I found myself working my mind, expanding it, letting the depth and coolness of the soil I tended take me into darkened rooms, a dusty attic primed to be cleared.
Dark bluish-gray rocks hugged the softened mulched mounds pocked with cacti, their overwintered pads plumping to greet the spring sun. Lizards shuffled beneath orange globemallow’s pollened cups, within which bees thrummed; thrashers crashed about the four-wing saltbush and swooped to snatch the occasional grub upturned by seed-searching pigeons.
All around, denuded earth had begun its repair.
Thoughts faded into the background, and with them ruminated past chapters—the passing glances, clandestine kisses, heartaches, heartmends.
From the limbs of the shaped evergreen—an upturned umbrella dancing in moonlight—wind-shattered chimes clanged in cacophonous asynchrony: a plaintive song to the approaching desert night.
All around, life continued to spring from the rot of others: mushrooms on a log.
***
We’ve been starved of unfettered life and peace; scouring ravaged lands pocked by broken promises of futures unrealized. A perpetual exhaustion. A perennial exultation.
When we sit and ponder, we’re free. With minds untethered to the next task, the looming deadline, dodging sycophants and narcissists, we escape inwardly—stretching muscles so accustomed to intentional atrophy through absorbing endless propaganda, narrowed, convoluted narratives justifying subordination.
But when our minds are free, we deduce, analyze, process, draw our own conclusions, and—for the bloated capitalist, the most excruciatingly terrifying step—take action: small or large, iteratively gradual or decisively sharp. In those fractions of thought, we are ourselves; we own our immediate future.
And continue to grow through those decisions.
***
Even on the darkest mornings, birds still sing—having the courage to break the void, call to those unseen, and join the awaiting chorus.